Twiggy protege claims 20% of Sun Biomedical, page-4

The rest is available without subscription now:


Peter Meurs has emerged as the top shareholder in Sun Biomedical.

Meurs is Development Director of $FMG/Fortescue Metals and a protege of FMG chairman Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest.

Meurs, formerly CEO of the Worley Parsons mining services group, owns 26m FMG shares valued at some $50m.

And he owns 264.2m shares in $SBN valued at $2.1m.

The holding represents 19.96% of an SBN share register expanded with a Forrest Capital placement to help fund development of SBN’s recently acquired Dimerix Bioscience.

While it would remiss to say that Peter Meurs controls SBN, it’s fair to say his stake is influential and could well qualify him for a board seat.

At present the only listed company board he sits on is that of FMG.

Second ranking shareholder in SBN is Matt Callahan’s SRV Custodians with a distant stake of 6.12%.

More distant – yet noteworthy – is the 13th ranking, 1.23% stake held by Dr Jackie Fairley’s $SPL/Starpharma, a backer of Dimerix’s research into chronic kidney disease (CKD).

Dimerix lead therapy known as DMX200 recently commenced a Phase 2 clinical trial in Australia under the Clinical Trial Notification pathway for the treatment of patients with CKD.

Study endpoints are Safety and reduction of the amount of protein leaking into the urine, proteinuria.

Initial data from the clinical trial is expected to be available during H1/CY16.
If the Phase 2 study is successful, Dimerix intends to register a product for an orphan indication such as Nephrotic Syndrome.